


make this chaos count

by callunavulgari



Series: Dark Month Collection [62]
Category: EOS 10 (Podcast)
Genre: M/M, Post-Season/Series 04, Time Travel, Timeline What Timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 02:20:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20900042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: “You really should stop looking for me,” Akmazian tells him, fingers creeping across Ryan’s ribcage, mapping the architecture of his ribs.





	make this chaos count

**Author's Note:**

> Day 4 of October. Once again pulling in about an hour before it is no longer October 4th. Today's prompts: beneath the mask, after life, creature, night sky, and “death is not the greatest loss in life, the greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live."
> 
> I'll be real, this is not my best work. But I was driving home tonight and a song came on that made me think of Ryan and Akmazian, so I wrote about the more tragic aspect instead of the spookier one, and leaned pretty heavily into that last prompt.

Ryan sees him out of the corner of his eye sometimes. Most of the time, it’s because he’s pulled a double shift or stopped the station from exploding and is running on so little sleep that his whole body aches for the total and absolute relief of oblivion. He doesn’t drink, so he can’t blame it on that - can’t say that he got a little too blitzed out of his mind and started hallucinating.

But he_ does_ see him sometimes. A hint of a tall figure rounding the corner, the swish of a familiar cloak vanishing into some dark shadow. A smile in the dark.

He doesn’t know if it’s just wishful thinking. If sometimes he wants so badly that his brain makes it true, if just for a moment. The span of seconds. The barest of glimpses. Maybe it’s something more - a fracture in the galaxy, a crack that only he can see through.

Sometimes it’s Ben. Familiar in all the wrong ways, like a holo gone slightly off color.

But most of the time, it’s _him_. Akmazian, the destroyer of stars. Except that was wrong, wasn’t it? Ryan was the destroyer of stars in this scenario, the man who got to pick the world he lived in, for better or for worse.

This reality is better, he’d said. In a lot of ways, it was.

He still makes the choice anyway. Again and again. Still rewinds. Remaps. Reroutes the universe like fixing a segue fault in the coding of all that black, all those stars.

Nothing fixes it. There is no fix. Some realities are better than others. In some, his parents are still together. His father is alive. _Dr. Urvidian_ is alive.

He can never find Akmazian. Not as he knew him.

In most realities, he’s simply gone. Dead or rewritten or off being a spy. But Ryan never finds what he’s looking for. So he lives for those moments when he catches a glimpse of Akmazian’s ghost. Real or in his head, he doesn’t give two shits.

“Are you ever going to stop looking for me?” Akmazian asks him one night.

Ryan is tired. Akmazian is a shadowed figure in the dark that he tries not to look at too closely, because if he does, Akmazian will be gone.

“Maybe,” Ryan tells him, and turns over onto his side. Away from the shadow, the ghost.

The bed dips under the weight of a person who isn’t really there, and Ryan can feel Akmazian’s breath on the back of his neck, warm and damp.

“Don’t touch me,” Ryan says, and means, _I don't want this to end yet._

“Wasn’t plannin’ on it, darlin',” Akmazian murmurs back, then drags his lips over the back of his neck anyway, just to be contrary. Ryan swallows, his throat dry, tongue thick in his mouth. He clenches his fingers in the sheets, eyes squeezed so tightly shut that his vision stains red behind his eyelids.

“Please,” Ryan says.

“You really should stop looking for me,” Akmazian tells him, fingers creeping across Ryan’s ribcage, mapping the architecture of his ribs.

“I know.”

“You’re never going to find me.”

Ryan laughs. “Never say never.”

There is silence behind him and then, “Ryan. Please. You’re hurting yourself.”

Ryan trembles a little when a hand lands on his hip, just this side of too solid.

“Don’t care.”

“You’re hurting the _stars_.”

Ryan is silent for a moment. Then, “I just miss you.”

A sigh.

“I know,” Akmazian murmurs, and leans over to place a kiss on Ryan’s forehead. “I miss you too.”

Ryan opens his eyes, turns to look, and like always, Akmazian is gone.

  
Each time he resets the world, something is different. Little things. Big things. The size and shape of the station. The amount that Dr. Urvidian drinks on a regular basis. If Jane is an assassin, or a nurse, or something else entirely.

But each time, he thinks that something gets through. Squeezes through the cracks after him. Maybe he’s doing irreparable damage to the timeline, splintering their reality bit by bit. Maybe after so many resets, the universe will just… come apart. Unravel, like a ball of yarn.

Sometimes, on his worst days, he wants that.

But he keeps resetting. Keeps searching. Hoping that the crack will open wide enough to let someone through.


End file.
